When you think of the levels of innovation you are required to give to the business, cloud is the right technology to do it.

Since the Cloud lives on the Internet, which is built upon the "bricks" of open standards, it should not surprise you that there is a drive to an ubiquitous Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) open source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds.

In October 2011, my neighbors to the South at Rackspace founded the OpenStack Foundation.

Today, IBM is announcing that we will be joining the OpenStack Foundation as Platinum-level sponsors along with AT&T, Canonical, HP, Nebula, Rackspace, Red Hat and SUSE.

The OpenStack Foundation has a great blog post that covers what's happening today and what the next steps will be.

This is the start of a very exciting future for cloud computing and of course there will be more news coming from the OpenStack Foundation in the weeks to come at events like the OpenStack Design Summit & Conference in San Francisco on April 16-20 and IBM Impact in Las Vegas on April 29 - May 4.

For those new to the blog, IBM SmartCloud Control Desk was one of the new announcements made at Pulse. It is a service catalog/service desk based on IT Infrastructure Library™ (ITIL™) V3 and ideal for streamlining incident, problem, change, configuration, release, and IT asset management.

This service desk offering will assist customers in process control center for managing change & configuration, assets, incidents/problems, service requests, SW licenses and more.

The announcement letter (212-051) was published on March 13 and we now have a very cool demo that showcases the solution.

IBMers are hyper-aware of our clients and the issues that they address when they're on the job. So much so, that I've said in past blogs that the majority of conversations I have with my colleagues start with, "How does [blank] beneift our customers?"

To that end, everything we do revolves around questions like - how can we give our customers what they need to get their job done and stay innovative in their industry?

Questions like that get answered at conferences like Pulse 2012. It's where we continue to deliver value to our customers.

And, as mentioned in yesterday's blog about the general session keynotes from Danny Sabbah, not technology just for technology's sake. Providing real business value.

This particular blog is going to focus on the specific announcements we made around cloud, starting with SmartCloud Foundation.

IBM SmartCloud Virtual Storage Center

Storage is "the next big line item" for IT, which is why the idea of improving storage efficiency has always been a hot topic.

Storage virtualization brings the promise of not only improving efficiency, but also providing levels of data mobility that are crucial to delivering modern services to customers.

The ideal solution for storage virtualization should be able to do both the virtualization/provisioning as well as the actual management.

And IBM SmartCloud Virtual Storage Center does both and it's one of the most impressive things being shown on the Expo Center floor here at Pulse 2012. Not to worry though, the team has information on the website and the team talks about this as well as all storage information on our @ibmstorage Twitter account and the Storage blog.

IBM SmartCloud Monitoring and IBM SmartCloud Provisioning

If you were following our SmartCloud announcements last year, you saw these two solutions make a big splash in the market and we're continuing to add value to both of these solutions.

Today. As in right this second, you can go to the ISM Library and download the "Service Health for IBM SmartCloud Provisioning" that will integrate provisioning and monitoring so that you easily monitor what you've provisioned and be able to identify and react to issues in your environment.

To help further simplify how you provision, we've released a statement of direction for SmartCloud Provisioning that may provide enhancements with image lifecycle management.

New features that may provide the ability to control image sprawl, an Image Construction and Composition Tool as well as highly automated self-service deployment of virtual machines.

All of which translate into spending less time wrestling your virtualization and cloud environments to ground and more time working on innovation.

IBM Endpoint Manager for Mobile Devices (New)

Yesterday's general session keynote emphasized mobile.

Between "Bring Your Own Device" (BYOD) and organizations embracing using their own mobile devices for their employees, mobile is the new platform of choice. (which means it's probably time to ditch my IBM 5100)

As you know, our IBM Endpoint Manager solution is built on BigFix technology and it's been invaluable to our overall service management strategy for Visibility. Control. Automation.(TM) (VCA)

On January 31, we announced an update to one of the key pieces of this portfolio; IBM Security Identity and Access Assurance 1.2.

Security was one of the three areas of focus with regard to increasing complexity and new features deliver improved identity and access governance with open authentication standards, role modeling and lifecycle management, and a virtual appliance delivery method all simplify deployment and provides faster time to value for security while reducing risk.

IBM SmartCloud Continuous Delivery

Continuous Delivery is a topic that we have discussed quite a bit on this blog (it has also been known as "collaborative development and operations" or "DevOps").

The challenge of getting services to users is balanced by ensuring that speed does not come at the expense of governance and increased risk.

The strategy to bring development and operations teams together is often stalled when the tools each team are using don't work well together.

Per the announcement letter, "IBM plans to provide an extensible architecture for delivering and managing the entire application lifecycle, creating an environment that brings development and operation teams together with collaboration, automation, and analysis."

IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

With IBM SmartCloud Control Desk, IBM plans to deliver a solution for service catalog, service desk, and IT Infrastructure Library™ (ITIL™) V3 based processes for incident, problem, change, configuration, release, and IT asset management.

This service desk offering will assist customers in process control center for managing change & configuration, assets, incidents/problems, service requests, SW licenses and more.

Software As A Service (SaaS) - IBM SmartCloud Solutions

The innovations happening with Smarter Planet, are quite simply staggering. One of the most interesting, and most visible, areas is in the Intelligent City solutions.

You've seen these solutions in market and in any number of places in the past, but now Intelligent Operations, Intelligent Transportation and Intelligent Water also have SaaS offerings that allow customers to quickly get started, since there is no hardware to procure or installation services to contract.

Cloud computing and VCA means less time (and resources and money) working on your infrastructure issues and more time being innovative.

To find out more about any of these solutions, contact your IBM sales rep contact your IBM sales rep or one of our Business Partners using the Business Partner Locator website.

* some of the new announcements are statements of direction and they are noted as such here and in the announcement letter. (and see the announcement letter and the bottom of this blog as the standard disclaimers apply).

Statement of direction disclaimer

IBM's statements regarding its plans, directions, and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice at IBM's sole discretion. Information regarding potential future products is intended to outline our general product direction and it should not be relied on in making a purchasing decision. The information mentioned regarding potential future products is not a commitment, promise, or legal obligation to deliver any material, code or functionality. Information about potential future products may not be incorporated into any contract. The development, release, and timing of any future features or functionality described for our products remains at our sole discretion.

For MSP's, IBM is providing a bundle of services and support in the way of marketing skills, technical expertise and financing options. On the marketing side, MSP's will have the ability to better target their customers and generate demand for their services through IBM education that includes topics such as developing effective marketing plans and exploiting the burgeoning social media space. Additionally, MSP's can sell IBM SmartCloud services under their own brand names. On the technical side, MSP's will have access to four new "Centers of Excellence" (located in China, Japan, Germany; and New York City) where they can collaborate with IBM technical experts to build their cloud services, and connect with other IBM ISV's. In terms of funding their efforts, IBM announced a financing offer which includes 12-month, 0% loans for IBM Systems, Storage and Software, and allows MSP's to defer payments for up to 90 days.

For end-users in the SMB space who often lack the necessary IT skills, this is a great opportunity to leverage local technology providers and take advantage of a cost effective "pay-as-you-go" model that cloud computing affords them. In addition, end-users will have the confidence of knowing that the services provided were built on an IBM platform.

Finally, for IBM, this is a great opportunity to expand its cloud ecosystem, and leverage the growing population of MSP's, who are continuing to gain traction in the cloud computing space for SMB's.

As the Western Hemisphere was slumbering, news from Singapore was lighting up Twitter as our senior executives took the stage at the IBM InterConnect conference to talk about some of the latest announcements from the IBM corporation on innovation and a Smarter Planet.

Much of the reporting has been done on Twitter (hashtag #IBMInterConnect) and these keynotes are available on the LiveStream including an amazing speech by Dr. Michio Kaku about the future of computers ("everywhere and nowhere").*

These are supplemented by interviews conducted by Todd "Turbo Todd" Watson, also on the LiveStream.

Since this event was focused on a Smarter Planet (the entire IBM portfolio), we covered a lot of ground. Big Data. Social. Mobility. And, of course, cloud.

For SmartCloud Foundation, the Tivoli organization has a number of exciting solutions that are designed to help you increase the levels of innovation you provide to your clients.

For this blog, I thought it'd be good to focus on three of the new solutions you might not have seen before that are going to help you in building out your private cloud.

IBM SmartCloud Cost Management is one of the key components in transforming IT from a "cost center" to an innovation center by providing levels of visibility, and transparency, to the IT costs associated with your cloud. Measure, analyze, report, and invoice the utilization and costs of physical, virtualized, and cloud computing resources, storage and network resources, applications, and other non-IT cost drivers.

IBM SmartCloud Patch Management combines the benefits of two solutions, IBM Endpoint Manager for Patch Management and IBM SmartCloud Provisioning, to provide an effective entry point that delivers lower costs and improves the visibility and control of physical, virtual, and cloud environments.

Finally, the IBM SmartCloud Virtual Storage Center is a solution that you might have seen us talk about at Pulse 2012 and it's now an exciting addition to the portfolio. This solution helps IT storage managers migrate to an agile cloud-based storage environment and manage it effectively without having to replace existing storage systems. If you're looking to increase your storage efficiency in cloud, but don't have the checkbook to do a "rip and replace" of your entire infrastructure, you need to be looking at this solution.

There's more going on in Singapore over the next two days, and more discussion of SmartCloud Foundation and IBM Smarter Planet. Stay tuned to Twitter and the LiveStream and feel free to post comments below.

* I have to confess that this blog was delayed because I got sucked into watching the keynotes.

It's not hardware. It's not software. It's a new category of solution; expert integrated systems.

It's one of the "game changer" solutions that our customers have come to expect from IBM (and that our partners love). It's solving very specific problems that customers have on their road to innovation.

One of those problems is built-in expertise. This is a hardware and software solution that is integrated at levels you've not seen before on a solution; giving customers and partners a simplified user experience for implementation and maangement.

IBM SmartCloud & Tivoli

To that point, you'll notice IBM PureSystems has it's own end-to-end management capabilities specific to the solution.

It does. But, for broader management challenges, IBM SmartCloud and Tivoli software will extend the investment in that IBM PureSystems solution by providing Visibility. Control. Automation(tm) across the entire IT infrastructure.

Together with IBM SmartCloud and Tivoli software, IBM PureSystems will push customers to higher levels of efficiency with their service management practice.

As you talk to your IBM sales rep or your business partner, ask them about IBM SmartCloud & Tivoli software with IBM PureSystems for your entire infrastructure and service management.